Directed Altruism and Enforced Reciprocity in Social Networks: How Much is A Friend Worth?

Stephen Leider, Markus M. Möbius, Tanya Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

NBER Working Paper No. 13135
Issued in May 2007

---- Acknowledgements -----

This paper replaces an earlier working paper version titled "Social Capital in Social Networks". We are grateful to Ed Glaeser, Muriel Niederle, Adam Szeidl and seminar participants at the 2004 Econometric Society Summer meetings, 2004 SITE, Max Planck Institute Ringberg Workshop on Social Networks, 2006 North American ESA meetings, Boston University, New York University, University of Connecticut, Texas A&M, Columbia University, Institute for Advanced Study and University of Michigan for helpful comments. We are particularly indebted to Rachel Croson and Al Roth for extremely helpful conversations during the design stage of our experiments. Paul Niehaus and Raphael Schoenle were excellent research assistants. We are grateful to the Social Security Administration and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College for financial support through a Sandell grant (Mobius, Rosenblat) and to the NSF (Leider). The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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